Clinton win in Pennsylvania replenishes campaign cash
Still lags in delegate count and popular vote
PHILADELPHIA - The financial benefits of Hillary Clinton's solid victory in the Pennsylvania primary became evident yesterday, as her campaign estimated that it would reap $10 million in new contributions in one day, even as her supporters and Barack Obama's debated whether the Pennsylvania result would change the trajectory of the Democratic race.
Governor Ed Rendell, Clinton's top Pennsylvania surrogate, called the outcome an "earthquake." A public memo from Obama's campaign declared the race "fundamentally unchanged."
Nonetheless, the boost in funds helped stabilize Clinton's campaign at a time when it was running a deficit and struggling to find the resources to compete with Obama in the next two states, Indiana and North Carolina. Clinton's $10 million windfall, from 60,000 donors who contributed online after appeals from Clinton and surrogates in their election-night remarks, will be enough to cover a debt that the campaign acknowledged earlier this week.
"They needed a cash infusion," said Chris Kofinis, a former campaign aide to John Edwards. "It allows them to be more competitive and viable in Indiana and North Carolina and beyond, but it doesn't change the overall dynamic. When you step back and analyze it, nothing changed."
Clinton's victory, by just under 10 percentage points, gives her, by current estimates, a nine-delegate gain, leaving her still lagging by at least 131 convention votes, according to the Associated Press.
The Pennsylvania result also did little to immediately alter the plans of the candidates. Both Clinton and Obama quickly moved on to Indiana, which will vote along with North Carolina in two weeks. The two states together offer nearly as many delegates as the 158 assigned to Pennsylvania. After that, seven other contests, the decisions of uncommitted superdelegates, and possible resolution of disputes over votes in Florida and Michigan remain to determine the party's nominee.
Still, Clinton's triumph in Pennsylvania revealed some of her electoral strengths and Obama's weaknesses. Clinton demonstrated her continued appeal to the older, white, working-class, and Catholic constituencies that are disproportionately influential in Pennsylvania politics, as evidenced by her victories in the state's industrial cities and inner-ring suburbs. She also appeared to break Obama's hold on the more prosperous suburbs, which have offered him support in previous states.
Yet her margin of victory, by around 215,000 votes, still leaves her about 300,000 short of her long-term strategic goal of equaling Obama's total number of votes nationally, counting Florida but not Michigan, where Obama wasn't on the ballot. Her supporters have identified a popular-vote victory as a prerequisite for a summertime appeal to superdelegates, the party leaders who will provide the decisive margin for either candidate.
Two of them, both Southern conservatives, announced their preferences yesterday, splitting between the two candidates. Representative John Tanner of Tennessee picked Clinton, while Governor Brad Henry of Oklahoma went with Obama. In addition, Obama gained the support of superdelegate Audra Ostergard, associate state-party chairwoman of Nebraska. The AP count yesterday showed Obama with 1,723.5 delegates to 1,592.5 for Clinton; 2,025 will be necessary to secure the nomination.
Obama's loss in Pennsylvania can be attributed largely to his inability to deliver in suburban areas where he had expected to do well. According to exit polls commissioned by news organizations, Obama led Clinton with college-educated voters by only 2 points, while she continued to dominate among those with the least education.
While those exit polls showed Obama leading Clinton by 20 points among voters in the Philadelphia suburbs, results reported yesterday from the four counties bordering the city showed that Clinton actually beat Obama in total votes there. In western Pennsylvania, Obama won Pittsburgh but lost Allegheny County by 10 points because he didn't carry the city's surrounding suburbs.
"Clinton basically battled Obama to a draw among college graduates, suggesting he may no longer be able to take these voters for granted," said Russ Tisinger, a Pennsylvania-based pollster with International Communication Research.
Delegates in the state were allocated largely on a proportional basis by congressional district, and the peculiar gerrymandering of some of them highlighted the unlikely coalitions that have come to sustain the two rival candidacies. Obama carried Pennsylvania's mostly conservative 16th Congressional District, a skein through the state's southern-central region that manages to include small urban clusters and college communities surrounded by increasingly liberal exurbs.
Among Clinton's strongest districts was the 13th, which is split between middle-class, white-ethnic neighborhoods of Northeast Philadelphia and upscale Montgomery County suburbs and which Clinton won by 25 points. Despite exit polls that showed Clinton with only a slight lead over Obama among Jews, the size of her win in the 13th - believed to have the heaviest concentration of Jews in the state - suggested that Obama had yet to close the gap despite aggressive outreach to the Jewish community.
"People sensed that if she didn't do well, that she was going to be in trouble, especially women," said Montgomery County Commissioner Joe Hoeffel, a Clinton supporter who previously represented the 13th Congressional District in Congress. "Throughout the primaries, women responded well to Hillary when they saw she might be nearing the end of the road. They gave her a little boost."
